Boycott games with deceptive money schemes

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The Electronic Arts video game company its due criticism because of a recurring payment model in the upcoming AAA title “Star Wars Battlefront 2.” In an attempt to defend their actions to members of the reddit.com community, the EA Community Team account has received a record of more than 400,000 downvotes on its post.

Players calculated that it would take approximately 40 hours to collect the 60,000 in-game credits needed to unlock the Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader characters.

“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes,” the EA account posted.

This feeling of accomplishment is lost when players are able to simply pay for the characters with actual currency.
Fans of the franchise are cheated out of their money because these characters are essentially locked behind a paywall separate from the $80 they already had to spend to purchase the game.

I can remember a time when paying $30 on a video game gave my parents heart attacks. Nowadays it’s rare to find a newly released title that doesn’t leave a dent in my wallet.

Game developers cannot give players the next-gen features they desire on decade-old budgets, but that doesn’t excuse companies from squeezing every cent out of their customers instead of making an enjoyable product.

The Daily Star describes another type of money trap with the practice of “loot boxes,” which also make an appearance in EA’s infamous game.

“The concept of loot boxes is basically glorified gambling, except the player doesn’t know what odds he is betting against,” The Daily Star said.

It’s easy to accuse people of idiocracy for purchasing digital products without any tangible value, but the reality is that many modern games are built to incentivize microtransactions with their limited gameplay.

“I am generally very much against predatory monetization schemes in F2P (free to play) games for consumable goods and even more so against them in premium games,” Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford said in a PlayStationLifeStyle article.

One point Pitchford made that I agree with is that the best way to protest a company is to simply not buy their products.
Many irritated EA customers have requested refunds for their pre-orders of Battlefront 2, as they should.

Others are taking this conflict too personal and are bullying the game’s developers. That is not the right way to get your voice across.

If there is going to be any change in the gaming industry, consumers need to put their money where their mouths are and not buy into money traps. Gamers need to realize that companies are not going to have the same intentions as their customers when they make products out of their beloved franchises.